My wife has been putting together a slide show for the Aurora Historical Society and I’ve been helping with some of the photo cleanup. She did the difficult part of culling a couple of hundred images out of 10,000 that are sort-of organized by different people over many years. We came across this gem.
My tool of choice for most of the work is Adobe Lightroom, but I was not pleased at what it was doing on this monster. I opened the image in Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 and ultimately tried “Auto Color” and it produced this:
I was still a bit disappointed by the haze, but the ClearView function in DxO Digital Optics 10 has become a go-to function for this correction, although I usually use it for distant landscapes that have haze. UPDATE 2015-09-06: A dehaze function is now available in Lightroom and it is very good and similar to the DxO offering. From a workflow perspective, I will be using the LR version without looking back. Thank you, Adobe! With tweaking the slider a bit, I arrived at this:
Then it was back to Lightroom for the final adjustments which produced this:
Remember, this is what we started with (and no, I did not do the original scan):